USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Metropolitan Boston; a modern history; Volume II > Part 31
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The factory which rose up, Phoenix-like, at Beverly, is now the largest and most completely equipped in any part of the globe, and if one of the numerous watchmen employed were to be forced to make the complete round of all the routes of the factory force of watchmen he would walk six miles through the sixteen buildings, with their aggregate floor space in excess of twenty-four acres, before he returned to the starting point.
Gathering about him the greatest mechanical experts available, Wins- low established the experimental division which began the herculean task of selecting and improving the then existing inventions, and into which as much as $450,000 a year was poured for research work, and which has grown until it occupies forty-three designing-rooms. No less than 125,000 distinct kinds of machine parts are kept in stock, all of which enter into the assembling of the 450 kinds of shoemaking machines that constitute the corporation's products.
Today, in the twenty-seventh year of its career, the United Shoe Machinery Corporation is rising to a new peak in its volume of business ; to larger fields of usefulness in making footwear, and to an enhanced and commanding position in the affairs of the manufacturing world. It now owns and operates nine plants in the United States and abroad for the production of shoe machinery, the total number of individual fac- tories approximating seventy, including units where are also produced findings and accessories, such as eyelets, nails, tacks, lasts, brushes, dies, cutters, paper cartons, and wooden packing cases.
When the Supreme Court of the United States ordered the heart cut from the company's shoe machinery leases, certain of whose restrictive clauses were declared to be in violation of the Clayton Act, the concern promptly proved its claim to supremacy in its chosen field without these factors.
This leadership has come about naturally through the exceptional service rendered by the corporation to its customers, first, in the leasing of the machinery made by it on a royalty basis, and second, by the system
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of maintenance whereby day and night, in all sections of the country, the users of the machinery have at their call expert repair crews furnished by the company through branch offices.
The money tribute paid for this service is ridiculously small in pro- portion to the total cost of a pair of shoes. The United States Census of Manufactures for 1923 valued at $950,000,000 the country's total output of 351,000,000 pairs of boots and shoes of all kinds, except rubber shoes, and in the same year the earnings of the United Shoe Machinery Cor- poration, before taxes and contingencies, were approximately $6,500,000, or less than three-quarters of one per cent. of the total shoe output value. The average per pair was under two cents. Even these figures do not give a correct idea of the comparative insignificance of the royalty and rental payments, as the company's published reports include also all earnings from its merchandising and foreign business.
The corporation operates foreign companies at Buenos Aires, Agen- tine Republic, South America ; at Melbourne and Sydney, Australia, and Wellington, New Zealand; at Bruxelles-Midi, Belgium; at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, South America ; at Montreal, Canada ; at Santiago, Chile, South America; at Havana, Cuba; at Copenhagen, Denmark; at Lei- cester, England ; at Tammerfors, Finland ; at Paris, France; at Frank- furt-am-Main, Germany, branch offices being maintained in Vienna, Aus- tria, in Aussig, Czecho-Slovakia, and in Holland; at Milan, Italy; at Mexico, Mexico; at Oslo, Norway; at Port Elizabeth, South Africa; at Barcelona, Spain; at Orebro, Sweden; at Zurich, Switzerland; and at Montevideo, Uruguay.
The main executive offices are housed in the Albany Building, adja- cent to the South Station, in Boston, and sixty-six factories produced the more than four hundred types of shoe machinery and accessories, sup- plies and findings, from which the company derives its income.
It is significant that in the evolution of this gigantic industrial off- spring of the shoe industry substantially all of the genius which produced it came from the loins of Massachusetts and of New England.
It was in Boston that Benjamin F. Sturtevant finished his pegging machine, which he had conceived in Maine; it was in a Cambridge attic that Elias Howe built the first model of his sewing machine, and, inci- dentally, in the same city, Isaac Merritt Singer, began his experimental work on the device that bore his name, and upon which he was forced by the courts to pay royalties to Howe for pirating the basic patent; it was in Cambridge, too, that Gordon Mckay lived in the days of his triumphs, while in the nearby town of Winchester he centered his metallic-fastening interests; it was the South Abington cobbler, Lyman R. Blake, who produced the machine for sewing soles to uppers that
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PLANT OF THE GILLETTE RAZOR COMPANY
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attracted Mckay's attention on Boston's famous Tremont Row; it was his brother-in-law, Robert H. Mathies, another Massachusetts inventor, who invented the rotary horn still in service as a McKay machine feature ; it was John Reece, of Boston, who created the machine used in sewing shoe-buttons; it was the little Lynn immigrant, Jan E. Matzeliger, who conceived and patented the device that is most human-like in its opera- tions of all the shoe-making inventions, and lastly, it was the stupendous energy, the creative ability, and the broad vision of that master of men, Sidney W. Winslow, that harnessed their inventions into one harmonious whole, and made possible the marvelous development of the United Shoe Machinery Corporation, only a quarter of a century ago.
And yet there exist in certain quarters those who say Massachusetts is asleep industrially, but, happily, the twentieth century story of this single industry gives the lie to the carping critic, and the progress made in this field is but typical of that which has taken place in other lines where Massachusetts and New England still lead the world.
The Biggest Little Thing Ever Patented-The Gillette Safety Razor -No invention of the nineteenth or twentieth century has brought greater freedom from the serfdom that surrounded millions of men of this and previous generations than the simple device patented by King C. Gillette when he conceived and protected from piracy the safety razor, which bears his name and which is daily employed by more people throughout the world than probably any article of every-day use.
Measured in terms of hours saved it is undoubtedly true that no product has been devised since the dawn of civilization which has so materially added to the time available for constructive effort on the part of those who previously were subject to the caprice and whims of tonsorialists, or to the annoying delays incident to the sharpening and honing of the old fashioned razor, as this hand-servant of mankind.
The sales of Gillette razors up to January, 1926, amounted to 53,611,682. Experts estimate that every razor sold by the company rep- resents a saving of half an hour of time spent in a barber shop, with no recognition of the amount of money paid for service, or given by way of tips. If only forty million of the fifty-four million owners of Gillettes use them daily-and this seems to be a conservative estimate-this would represent a saving of twenty million hours per day, which could be devoted to gainful labor, study or recreation. This time is equivalent to 2,500,000 working days of eight hours, or the labor of more than 8,000 men constantly employed, and if their average wage should be assumed to be $5 per day, the figure represents a saving of upwards of $40,000 a day, or for a year of 300 working days, a gain of labor equivalent to more than $12,000,000.
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To January 1, 1926, 258,841,659 packets of Gillette blades had been sold from the inception of the original corporation, or the amazing total of 3,118,099,808 individual blades.
King Gillette was born with a penchant for inventions, but it was not until 1895, when he was in his fortieth year, that he first thought of the razor. Following the great Chicago fire, in which his father lost everything but his life, young Gillette had been the pilot of his own destiny, and from his twenty-first year until the fall of 1904, he was one of that great army of American traveling salesmen which has marched so valiantly into the marts of business and has placed the United States on a business plane unapproached by any other nation on the face of the globe. In the twenty-eight years between 1876 and 1904 Gillette had placed around various inventions the protection of the patent laws of his country, and while some of his products possessed much merit and made money for others, he had been unable to profit personally to any great degree from the sale of these devices, nor did he possess the finan- cial ability to successfully market them.
In 1891 there came to him one of those fortunate occurrences, which so often creep into the lives of men but which more frequently are not taken advantage of, when he accepted a position with the Crown Cork & Seal Company, of Baltimore, Maryland, which was then placing upon the market the device known as the Crown Cork-the tin cap with the cork lining, now so extensively used by bottlers of beverages. It was during one of Gillette's visits to the home of William Painter, the inven- tor of the article, that the latter said to his guest: "King, you are always thinking and inventing something. Why don't you try to think up something like the Crown Cork, which, when once used, is thrown away, and the customer keeps coming back for more-and with every additional customer you get, you are building a permanent foundation of profit ?"
Then and there was born the idea of the safety razor-nebulous, hazy, inchoate at the moment in the mind of King Gillette, but Painter's words had formed lodgment in the Boston man's fertile brain. Obsessed with the idea, to an extent that often made him provoked, he tried to apply Painter's suggestion to some material need, but nothing came of it until four summers later, when there was evolved as naturally as though its embryonic form had matured in thought and but awaited the appropriate time of issue, the safety razor which was to bring fame and fortune to its inventor.
King Gillette tells the event in his own words: "One particular morning when I started to shave I found my razor dull, and it was not only dull but it was beyond the point of successful stropping and it needed honing, for which it must be taken to a barber or to a cutler.
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As I stood there with the razor in my hand, my eyes resting on it as lightly as a bird settling down on its nest-the Gillette razor was born. I saw it all in a moment, and in that same moment many unvoiced questions were answered more with the rapidity of a dream than by the slow process of reasoning.
"A razor is only a sharp edge and all back of that edge is but a sup- port for that edge. Why do they spend so much material and time in fashioning a backing which has nothing to do with shaving? Why do they forge a great piece of steel and spend so much labor in hollow grinding it when they could produce the same result by putting an edge on a piece of steel that was only thick enough to hold an edge?
"At that time and in that moment it seemed as though I could see the way the blade could be held in a holder; then came the idea of sharpening the two opposite edges on the thin piece of steel that was uniform in thickness throughout, thus doubling its service; and follow- ing in sequence came the clamping plates for the blade with a handle equally disposed between the two edges of the blade. All this came more in pictures than in thought, as though the razor was really a fin- ished article before my eyes. I stood there before the mirror in a trance of joy at what I discerned.
"Fool that I was, I knew little about razors, and practically nothing about steel. I could not forsee the trials and tribulations that I was to pass through before the razor was a success. But I believed in it and joyed in it. I wrote to my wife, who was visiting in Ohio, 'I have got it; our fortune is made,' and I described the razor and made sketches so she would understand. I would give much if that letter could be found today, for it was penned upon the inspiration of the moment and described the razor very much as you see it today, for it has never changed in the form or principle involved-only in refinements."
Gillette went at once to Wilkinson's hardware store on Washington Street, Boston, where he bought some pieces of brass, some steel ribbon used for clock springs, a small hand vice, some files, and with these crude materials fashioned the first Gillette safety razor. He prepared endless sketches which afterwards played important roles in patent suits, and which formed the basis of establishing the time and scope of his invention. Today, these rude sketches are a part of the company's records.
Then followed his hours of trial, because he could interest nobody in a razor, the blades of which were to be used once and thrown away. Gillette then thought the razor blades could be produced for an infini- tesimal sum, as he learned that steel ribbon could be purchased for sixteen cents a pound, and that sixteen ounces would make five hundred
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blades, the size proposed being slightly narrower and shorter than the blade finally placed upon the market. He was not then aware that the steel to be employed must of necessity be of a particular quality, and that it would cost many times more per pound than he anticipated, nor could he forsee the fact that the future company which was to manu- facture the product must expend more than $250,000 in laboratory tests before this one question of the type of steel to be used in the blades could be determined.
For six long years thereafter cutlers and machine shop experts in Boston, New York, Newark, and at Massachusetts Institute of Tech- nology experimented in an effort to secure an edge on sheet steel that would shave. They told him a razor edge was only possible when cut out of cast steel forged and fashioned under the hammer to give it den- sity so that it would "take" an edge.
Not until fate brought King Gillette into touch with William E. Nickerson, a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a most eminent mechanician, was the Gillette razor made a practical article of commerce. He produced the machines and devised the processes which made the razor a commercial possibility, but it was a long and hazardous road that the first group traversed between 1901 and 1904.
Of all the little things that have been invented the Gillette razor is the biggest little thing ever issued from the United States Patent Office, and even today those closest to it regard the company as merely in its infant stage.
Its officers believe it has not begun in the less than a quarter of a century of its existence to approach a small part of the potential world market, for in the United States alone insurance statistics prove that there is a normal increase of 2,500,000 persons who arrive at the shaving age each year, and out of a total of upwards of 800,000,000 men who shave in this world, the company has provided but 54,000,000 razors thus far.
It is, however, in the blade production that the greatest opportunities lie. The company is now turning out 2,335,000 blades every working day, drawn to an edge that cannot be measured by any human instruments.
With the main factories at Boston, employing 2,000 hands, and aux- iliary plants in England and Montreal, and offices in practically every country in Europe, Asia, South Africa, Australia, and South America, the company is endeavoring to meet the incessant demands upon its products. It has no fear of competition so long as it maintains the qual- ity of its goods because its officers realize that with its razors and blades being marketed by more than 500,000 dealers throughout the world any attempt to duplicate such a distribution would cost so many millions of
UNITED DRUG
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dollars in capital investment that no group would be rash enough to make the attempt.
Through improvements in processes and machinery the Gillette Com- pany is today securing five times the output of product that it manufac- tured in 1909, a condition of efficiency which cannot be likened in any other industry in the world, and which is but added evidence that in Massachusetts there exist just as conspicuous examples of industrial progress and advancement as are observed in the mass production methods of the middle western automobile concerns.
To accomplish this result the Gillette Company has rubbed no mythical Aladdin's Lamp, but it has drawn upon the magic power and the inventive genius of the human mind to give birth to methods of greater efficiency and economy.
The net earnings of the Company for 1906, when it first showed a profit, to January 1, 1926, amounted to $81,730,666, and it had paid cash dividends to stockholders during that period of $34,497,691, to say nothing of stock dividends declared.
Today the total daily capacity of the Boston, Canadian and English plants is 119,000 razor sets, and 2,235,000 blades, or for a working year of 300 days, 35,700,000 razors and 670,500,000 blades.
The United Drug Company-An International Industrial Giant-An idea born on a railroad train between Seattle and Spokane, Washington, evolved from the mind of a twenty-five-year-old American traveling salesman, himself a native of Detroit, Michigan, was responsible for an industry, whose headquarters are in Boston, and which, twenty-three years after its inception, is doing a business of $150,000,000 a year-by far the largest drug industry in all the world, with more than 1130 stores in the United States and Great Britain, and possessing upwards of 10,000 stockholder agents in both countries.
When the concept flashed through the brain of Louis K. Liggett that the path to success in the drug industry of the United States lay in pooling the business of individual drug stores he had no idea of the pace at which his vision would travel or the sphere of influence it would cover in less than a quarter of a century thereafter.
Calling on forty druggists in as many cities of the Far and Middle West, young Liggett imparted his plan of something different than these men had ever thought of before, and, securing $4,000 from each of them, the United Drug Company became a corporate entity in March, 1903, for the purpose of making and distributing the goods to be sold to the public in these two score stores; of ultimately merging into a national reputation thousands of local and divergent medicinal and other spec-
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ialties ; of establishing economies in production and distribution, and of consolidating these influences into one composite whole.
These original investors, who became manufacturers and distributors, were not only able to make larger profits, but it was given to them to supply the public with better goods in larger quantities and at lesser prices than previously.
There was, however, the germ of a bigger idea involved in the set-up of the United Drug Company than the mere economical production and distribution of drugs. The component units talked in groups, unfolded to each other all the secrets of their respective stores and dispensed inspiration to do a better and bigger business, while the progressives stirred up the conservatives, and the practical merchandisers in the con- stantly growing groups exchanged ideas with those who lived in the purely ethical world, and there were thus established binding friend- ships-all of which developed into service to the communities where they so successfully operate today.
The first year's business, done in a part of a building containing 30,000 square feet of floor space amounted to $67,000, but expansion quickly followed until today it requires an eight-story concrete building covering an entire square in the city of Boston to produce the confec- tionery products supplied to the Liggett and Rexall stores of the United Drug Company, into which enter carloads of cocoa beans from Venezu- ela, Mexico, Central America, and the West Indies; nuts by the ton and fruits fresh from the vines and trees. The Company contracts for the ingredients for its perfumes in the floral fields of France and Bulgaria, distilling the concretes or essence of petals, and blending them into tan- talizing odors through the medium of automatic machinery.
Building up one of the largest toilet goods' businesses in the world on the policy of large volume sales, low manufacturing costs, reasonable profits, and quality value there has been scarcely a year when the Com- pany's production could care for its increasing sales. Branches have been opened in Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco, while a rubber factory in New Haven, Connecticut, owned by a United Drug subsidiary corporation, produces the rubber products handled by the stores ; three large stationery factories in Worcester and elsewhere produce envelopes and letter-paper ; a plant at Highland Park, New York, turns the grapes produced on the soil of the Empire State, and the strawberries grown on the company's Virginia farm into fruit juices, while tobacco companies and other producing groups contribute to the varied needs of the corporation.
The Liggett chain of retail drug stores owned outright by the United Drug Company is the outgrowth of a small beginning when there was
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but one store in Buffalo, New York. They now reach from Bangor, Maine, to Los Angeles, California; Minneapolis to New Orleans, Miami, and back to the eastern seaboard. As fast as possible stores were added where the rights of Rexall agents would in nowise be encroached upon. While many of the Liggett units are successors to former individually owned Rexall stores, no branch has been opened save where the proposal came from a Rexall owner. The company considers its contracts with its agents sacred and its policy has been to accord them complete inde- pendence of action.
When Liggett assumed a twenty-year lease in the McAlpin Hotel, in New York City, at $110,000 a year, and later leased the store in the Grand Central terminal at $115,000 per annum, it was questioned by many whether these units would pay, but they have been successful from their opening, the latter today doing the largest drug business of any store of its kind in the world, the receipts being over a million dollars annually.
A tremendous addition to the chain was made in 1915, when the Riker-Hegeman stores were taken over. Within a stone's throw of the Liggett Building, at Madison Avenue and 42d Street, New York City, there are today seven retail United Drug stores whose aggregate yearly sales amount to $3,000,000.
The English branch, established about 1910, was serving more than a thousand Rexall units in the British Isles, when, in the spring of 1920, Louis K. Liggett purchased of Sir Jesse Boot-the owner of the Boot's Pure Drug Company, comprising 632 retail shops, and four large manu- facturing plants located at Nottingham, England-the assets of that great corporation. There have since been added to that chain some 138 additional stores, and no extension of the interests of the United Drug Company has proven so far reaching and so profitable to the stockholders as this great accession to its ramifications. It would have required years to create, organize and develop the Company's business abroad to the proportions that had been reached by Boot, whose stores at the time were doing a business of $30,000,000 a year. Liggett's International was created and it is now the operating company for all the English and Canadian connections.
The United Drug Company has a capital of $100,000,000, but this sum by no means represents the investment of the subsidiaries which it controls.
It is rather significant that in creating this great industry its founder and controlling head, himself a traveling salesman whose territory at the time embraced the domains of the nation from the Middle West to
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the Pacific Coast should have found it desirable, if Massachusetts and New England were on the verge of industrial decadency, to locate the United Drug Company in Boston, as he did. The fact that he chose to incorporate the corporation under the laws of Massachusetts and to establish its main headquarters in the capital city of the Commonwealth, rather than in one of the great industrial marts of the Middle West is merely added evidence that this municipality is still favorably regarded as a desirable place in which to locate the great industrial enterprises of modern times.
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